One hackathon I went to a few weeks ago had a Developer Relations employee stand up and say: “Who wants to use our API? It uses SOAP – sorry. If you want documentation – come see me because it’s not on the website. Oh, and it’s read only. Let me know as soon as possible because it takes 6 hours to approve your API key.” This is madness. Developers are human too! They need some HCI love between them and their APIs. So, here are my hastily scribbled thoughts on what an API needs at a minimum to entice the busy developer.